Every year, April 20 is Disability Day in Korea.

I’ve been working on web accessibility at a university since 2010, but honestly, I never made a point of marking this day. I’d catch news about events held under the banner of Disability Day, but my own work felt like something that lived inside a monitor — far removed from those in-person gatherings.

Then this year, on that very day, I received Korea’s Minister of Education Commendation.

It Started as Just a Job

In September 2010, I joined Daegu Cyber University. My role was to develop and operate the university’s web services. The term “web accessibility” existed in development guidelines online, but at the time, it was just one item on a long list of things that needed to be done.

Back then, web accessibility was understood at the level of “put alt text on images.” There was a certification system, but the general atmosphere, as I remember it, was that many organizations saw it as tedious, difficult work.

In 2011, a survey by the Korea Web Accessibility Assessment Center found that our university had the highest score among cyber universities in the country — 81.9 points. That was the first time I thought: I can do this work properly. Or more honestly — it was the first time I truly felt that this work mattered.

The Day We Earned a National First

In October 2014, we obtained our first web accessibility quality certification for the university website. That wasn’t unusual — many organizations had already been certified.

But one thing kept nagging at me.

The space students use most at a university isn’t the homepage — it’s the virtual classroom. That’s where students with disabilities attend lectures, submit assignments, and communicate with faculty. And yet, no one had obtained accessibility certification for a virtual classroom. It wasn’t a public-facing website, and the classroom environment was complex enough to make the work harder and more time-consuming.

Then one day, our university became the first in the country to obtain web accessibility quality certification for a virtual classroom.

The process wasn’t easy. The classroom system included solutions developed by external vendors, so improving accessibility meant negotiating with those developers, running tests, and cycling through revision requests repeatedly. The video player alone took a significant amount of time. Along the way, I heard the question a few times: “Is this really necessary?”

Yes, it is. Because students with disabilities need to be able to attend class properly.

When It Became Numbers

In 2023, I participated as a co-researcher in the Ministry of Education’s survey on educational welfare support for students with disabilities at universities. The work involved assessing the level of information accessibility across 165 universities nationwide.

Compiling those numbers gave me a lot to think about. Some universities were doing genuinely well. Others hadn’t even started. The difference wasn’t technical capability — it was attention. Whether someone had been consistently holding onto this issue, or not.

That experience built toward what became ModuWeb.

ModuWeb: So It Wouldn’t Just Be Mine

Organizations with sufficient budgets and developers can improve accessibility. What about those that don’t?

That question stayed with me. The improvements made where I worked weren’t reaching anywhere else.

So I open-sourced ModuWeb, a web accessibility support tool we’d built in-house. The goal was to make it usable by organizations with limited budgets and technical resources. It wasn’t a grand plan — I just didn’t want others to repeat the trial and error I’d already gone through.

It’s still far from complete. But after releasing it, I heard from a few organizations, and that became a small beginning.

What the Commendation Means

When I first heard I was receiving a commendation, I’ll be honest — it felt a little strange.

Accessibility work doesn’t show up easily. When accessibility is done well, no one notices. If a student with a disability logs into the virtual classroom without difficulty and attends a lecture, they just attended a lecture. No one says, “I had a great class today because of accessibility.” The reverse is true: when something doesn’t work, there are inquiries, complaints, support requests.

After years in development, you come to know this: when things are working, it’s quiet; when they’re not, it’s loud.

Someone paid attention to that quiet work. Looking back on 15 years, that was what made me happiest.

This Wasn’t Achieved Alone

The commendation has my name on it, but this wasn’t something I did alone.

Daegu Cyber University was founded on the idea of creating an environment where anyone can learn, regardless of time or place. Whether you have a disability, whether you’re working, whether you live far away — no one should be excluded from learning. That founding philosophy aligns precisely with what web accessibility is about. I was able to keep doing this work for so long because I worked in a place that held that philosophy. It kept me from losing direction, and kept me from giving up along the way.

And the colleagues who were there. Team members who accepted accessibility improvements as a matter of course rather than something to negotiate into the schedule. People who carried the tedious work of certification alongside me. Because of them, I was able to keep at this steadily.

This commendation, I think, belongs to them as well.

April 20 now means something a little different to me.

There are things I want to do going forward. I want to continue contributing technically to the field of web accessibility. I hope ModuWeb finds its way into more organizations, and beyond that, I’d like to build development tools and components where accessibility is built in from the start. If I can contribute to emerging WCAG 3.0 policy, even better. I want to help create a culture where developers treat accessibility not as something layered on afterward, but as something naturally woven into the design from the beginning.

Looking at the bigger picture, I want to help bring closer the day when people with disabilities are recognized in the digital world not as “people who put up with inconvenience,” but as equal users. I believe technology can close that distance.

And someday, I hope to hear developers and product owners say, naturally and without prompting: “Web accessibility? Of course — that’s just how we do it.”

We’re not there yet. So we keep going.